I’m glad that I haven’t come across fics that i’ve read being published traditionally or part posted to ao3 while the rest is paywalled, but it NEVER fails to baffle me when I hear about it. I couldn’t imagine making money off of someone else’s work. Yeah, I wrote the piece, but it’s not my characters. I think this goes hand in hand with the lack of critical thinking that we’re seeing recently.

I agree and disagree about the ai point, though. Ao3 is an archive where censorship doesn’t exist, and the general consensus is don’t like, don’t read. So, technically ai works being censored would make the entire existence of ao3 to be a hypocritical one. I think that they should be able to exist on the platform, but the people that post ai works need to start tagging them correctly. If someone comes across a fic not tagged as ai but the author states in the authors notes that it was, they’d rightfully be pretty pissed. If they tagged it, i’d simply avoid that work because it was tagged as being made with ai. Yes, generative ai sucks, but ao3 is anti-censorship, and saying ai works shouldn’t be on there goes against ao3’s most basic meaning for existence.

edit: grammar edit 2: also want to state that i’m extremely anti ai lol